newtown, connecticut
My dad is a postal worker and the term “going postal” was a joke in our house growing up, a way of diffusing or reclaiming a phrase that perpetuates a hurtful stereotype that postal workers are crazy and violent or that the post office is somehow a dangerous place. Less than a year after my parents moved away from my hometown and my dad transferred to a post office out of state, a woman walked into the facility where he used to work and murdered six of his former coworkers. The woman was an ex-employee, someone my dad had worked with years before. He remembered her as seeming not quite right.
I was a senior in high school when Columbine happened. I remember finding out about it after school on a warm spring day a couple of months before graduation and thinking, cynically, that it wasn’t surprising. There had been quite a few school shootings in the years leading up to that, everyone had seen Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” video a few years back, and the shootings always seemed to happen in places I assumed were oppressive–cookie-cutter suburbs and rural backwaters. I felt detached from it all and annoyed with the media for repeating the phrase “trenchcoat mafia.” I don’t remember ever feeling unsafe at my school, like anything like that could happen there. High school sucked, but mine didn’t seem to have a particularly exclusive culture. There were athletes and goths and hippies and no clear popular group to make any “type” or weirdo feel like the only one on the outside. I’m not saying there weren’t outcasts; it just wasn’t an environment that seemed likely to drive outcasts to revenge or insanity. I think we were all pretty privileged to know there was a lot more to life than high school. This is what I remember, anyway.
The charter school I teach at shares a campus with a large, comprehensive high school. Our classrooms are hooked up to their intercom system, which they say they can’t disconnect because what if there was an emergency? Every day, we have to listen to the other school’s announcements and their students being called to the attendance office. We usually talk over it, me shouting the homework or instructions for the beginning of class. This morning, there was a lot of commotion in class, kids bustling to find papers, turn things in, etc., so I could only hear snippets of the announcements, including the other school’s principal saying, “There are things on the news that make us want to cry.” I thought, “Well, yeah, now that you mention it the budget crisis does make me want to cry.” She went on to say something about “peace and love,” which was unusual but I didn’t think too much of it. My student teacher was teaching that period, so I left to go to the bathroom and make tea before sitting down at the computer in the corner of the room and opening up the news to learn of the school shooting in Connecticut. I sat there in a daze while class went on. When I was a teenager, these events didn’t surprise me, but as an adult, each one arrests my heart for a second. Watching the news feels surreal, like I’m watching a dystopian horror film, warning that this is what America could come to. I listen to news analysis that goes on and on about guns, mental healthcare, and media–all of which are relevant–but it is my belief that mass shootings are a virus or a symptom of one, a sign that the society we live in is seriously ill. I do not believe that this kind of crime occurs in a society with a moral compass or in a culture that lives by a value system in which all human beings are treated like they have equal and inherent worth. Mass shootings, I am sure, only happen in a society where people feel alienated by a lack of meaningful relationships and a lack of meaningful work, in a society where the only power available is brute force. Let’s be clear: guns, mental healthcare, media are not roots of anything. These are products of our culture, just like killers are. What do they say about the values we live by? About how and to what we assign worth? I’m not talking about the values we say we live by. I’m talking about where we put our money. Where we put our time. Where we put our eyes, our ears, our energy. What that says about us. We’re all part of this.
how music works
David Byrne is a genius, and he steals all my ideas.
I had no idea he had this new book out until I stumbled across it in the pirate store, of all places. From the preface:
…the same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. Depending on where you hear it–in a concert hall or on the street–or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works–if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish, but what it is.
This is what I call “the politics of Bruce Springsteen appreciation.” Awhile ago, I noticed that people about ten years older than me whose taste in music I respected didn’t like Bruce Springsteen, while people that age who had what I thought of as pedestrian taste in music thought he was the shit. I thought he was the shit, so this confused me until I thought about sociocultural context. My generation doesn’t care that Ronald Reagan stole “Born in the U.S.A.” or that a bunch of frat boys listened to Springsteen in the ’80s because we were babies then. We can know it as really awesome music without any cultural associations we don’t want. But another generation was defining their taste in music (and their image along with it) in the ’80s, and if you were a punk, it wasn’t “cool” to like Springsteen. That kind of prejudice can tend to stick even after you’ve matured past image bullshit. Springsteen’s music is the same, but it’s heard differently by different people at different times, and even someone whose music preferences otherwise align with mine is going to find points of contention if their formative social environment didn’t support the same hearing mine did.
I was recently on the other end of this experience when my students invited me to participate in their mix CD exchange. It was fascinating to listen to one 16-year-old’s mix after another. For one thing, their mixes contained way more ’90s music than mine. Some of it is respectable (The Pixies, Beck, Radiohead, etc.), but that other songs have withstood the test of time boggles the mind. Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” for example, made it on two different kids’ CDs. I don’t like any of their mixes all the way through, and had a friend given one of them to me and said, “Here, I made you this mix,” I would have been confused, but hearing the songs recontextualized from a 2012 teenager’s point of view changes how they sound. It can simply inspire marveling at how two tracks can coexist on the same CD: “Wow! You like MGMT and The Dave Matthews Band?” or it can alter my perception of the music itself, like the day I found myself driving home from work with one of the more smoothly crafted mixes in my car and actually enjoying an Oasis song. The horror!
A few months ago, I was at a dinner party where some guy said my tattoo reminded him of the Hall and Oates’ song “Private Eyes.” I said I didn’t know the song and mostly associated Hall and Oates with people making fun of them. He said, “Really? I think they’re one of the best bands of the twentieth century!” I scanned for irony, detected none, and then felt like an asshole. For a day, I thought maybe I was missing something, that Hall and Oates was a great musical oversight on my part, so I watched a bunch of their videos on YouTube, and UH, NO. But then I thought about the politics of Bruce Springsteen appreciation and felt like an asshole again. Without knowing this guy’s music-listening context, how could I judge? He looked about my age, but clearly something about where, how, or with whom he grew up had disposed him to hear music competely different from me. Maybe Hall and Oates is the best band out of all the other bands he knows. Jesus, though, out of what musical pool does Hall and Oates rise to the top? I mean, really.
library of diaries
“The bookbinders,” she said “have always been the illiterate ones.”
The teachers I’ve had at the San Francisco Center for the Book have all been women with nicks and scars on their hands and a style of dress I’ll call “indie rock librarian.”
It’s odd I would take up bookbinding at a time in my life when I’m also renouncing perfectionism–it’s an exact art. We use an old-fashioned protractor-like device and measure things in millimeters. The boards and pages are cut uniformly with a two-ton steel paper cutter the size of a car. The teachers discourage using pencil marks for anything and say the lines of the cloth shouldn’t show too much through the endsheets.
Sewing is one of the best parts about making books. It’s graceful and meditative, but though I’ve done the stitches before, I can never remember the pattern on my own. The teacher said something about sense memory, and I wonder at times if mine isn’t a little underdeveloped. My memory, it seems, is more tightly tied to language than most people’s. It’s why I have to be taught how to play chess every single time I play chess and why, though I love jazz, I can’t remember any wordless jazz song no matter how many times I’ve heard it. I was taken to a silent movie once and afterward had no idea what happened in it at all. Had I been born deaf and mute or raised by wolves, I wonder if I’d even have a memory. It isn’t a negative thing–it’s also why I win nine out of ten games of Words With Friends, earned a rare 800 on the verbal section of the SAT the first time I took it, and write well despite very little formal composition instruction outside of the usual school classes. Language isn’t symbolic to me; it’s concrete. This is opposite how most people think of it. Whereas what most people think of as black-and-white, logical, like numbers, stress me out and I don’t have an intuitive sense of how things are put together, built. To cook I need a recipe, written in words.
Bookmaking is, in a way, a marriage of my strengths and weaknesses. I measure, cut, sew, and glue exactly so in order to have a house for my words, a vehicle in which to convey the transformative power of language, naming. I remember the lovers I came to love in the utterance of the word, “love,” and the lovers I never said I loved, but had I said it, would have. Given my intimacy with language, it’s ironic how difficult it can be for me to communicate. But I hate confrontation, not communicating. It’s like knocking on a door, looking for a house for my language and my love, fearing the entry requires a perfection I know my stumbling through the doorway won’t have. But it does now:
